Discovering a Forgotten City | Abandoned Nearly 100 Years | Destination Adventure

Antiox is unique in the sense that it's so remote, the access of getting there is so challenging. You ask people from overseas and most of them you know never heard of the place and a lot of people in BC have never heard of the place. We barge over trucks and ATVs and you know diesel fuel for the generator and so it really is an undertaking to get people over there and you have to have all that infrastructure there to get around and see these things and I think that just makes it more special as far as ghost towns go and you know other people have said you know it's kind of the holy grail of ghost towns in Canada really just because it is so remote and inaccessible and just so vast as well. Ever since I was a kid all I wanted to be was an explorer. Sail the seven seas, find new worlds. But Uncle D everything's already been found. What? Like everything? Well yeah. Oh man. Well so much for that but if I can't be an explorer I can still be an adventurer. So I bought a motorhome and I'm hitting the open road. My name is Dustin Porter and this is Destination Adventure. Antiox is a copper mining town from early 1900s. It was a town that ran from 1914 to 1935 and produced blister copper because it was 99% pure. It was I think the largest copper mine and smelter in the British Empire at that time. It was owned by a company called Granby Consolidated. They were a company out in New York. They'd already had some interest down in the Kootenays and were running out of ore down there and needed another place to start up a mine and I guess they had seen good results up in Antiox and yeah took it from there and they were there for 21 years until it shut down due to the depression and low copper prices. They spent another seven years basically taking out a lot of the steel and that for the war effort. After that and then a big fire came down in 1942 with a you know a skeleton crew of about a dozen guys there and their families and yeah the fire took out pretty much everything there in town that was wood. All the trees and wooden buildings and you know then the concrete structures and steel structures are kind of what remains today. And then yeah after that 1942 period not a lot of people I don't think went in there after that. It's been pretty much a ghost town since then and a few mining exploration companies gone in poked around, Techcominco and a few other ones just to see what the prospects were for maybe opening up another copper mine there just seeing you know what the reserves are like in that area. Some people thought that you know maybe they had it tough but I don't think they realized what was happening on the outside world and you know people had you know they had radio there, they had plumbing, they had electricity, there was telephones there, they had you know movies there, they had the circus come there, they you know they had all the amenities you could want. You know pretty much everyone had a house that wanted a house and the single guys lived in apartments they had barber shops and pubs and you know everything you would want in a town Antioch's pretty much had. By the end of the life of the the mine you know they did go on strike a couple times asking for more wages and you know when the price of copper had just plummeted and you know the company had a couple years worth of copper eventually lying on their dock it wasn't being sold they were just producing copper and and not selling it so there's those people that lived there that you know did realize that they had quite a few amenities and if not they realized it when they got out of there. One of the biggest things was their health and that that you know they you read the newspaper clippings and if you know if they had more births than deaths they thought they were one of the healthiest places in North America that's how they gauged their their their health there but you know and it couldn't have been good I mean you know the there was the toxic fumes and that the sulfur dioxide coming out of that smelter stack was was so potent it killed trees around you know 20 kilometer radius around the town there was kids that hadn't seen a green plant in 10 years and had to go down to Ellis Arm or Kitsault to you know to see some vegetation and you know there's stories of them lighting the snow on fire during an inversion in the winter you know there's so much sulfur that had you know settled on the snow that you know was actually flammable. You know you see all the newspaper clippings of the guys that worked in the mine and you know all these accidents accidents that happened you know getting crushed by ore and rocks and you know cables and stuff like that so there were quite a few deaths there from you know working in the mine it was definitely not a safe place to work so you know in that sense lots of people did you know die on the job. The dam is probably one of the most iconic structures that's still there and you know and it is one of the reasons why we're actually able to do tours there is because the owner of Antiox the site Jeff Woolridge has a company Antiox Electric or Hydroelectric and they have plans to refurbish that dam and put it back in use and generate electricity I think there's enough megawatts there to power all the terrace and Prince Rupert from that dam. It's such a iconic piece and you know I always watch people's expression they come down this hill you know after we've driven five kilometers up through a mountain and down this hill on a brushy road and you know this thing just comes out of nowhere and it's just kind of amazing that you know you just don't expect that you know that far up the valley and yeah I mean it's 100 years old and yeah it's just it's such a magnificent structure and just the architecture on it is amazing all the curves and arches and that and you know the the guy who built that John Eastwood was you know renowned for his architecture and his dams and and also for the the thin I guess amount of concrete that he actually used in that and he was kind of ostracized by the the dam builders of the United States who were all about just pure raw power in their dams you know these big earthen filled dams with rocks and boulders and that and they didn't like John's idea of a dam that it was so thin and just didn't have confidence for the people living downriver is what the engineers thought that you know even if his dams did hold back water and you know had a good longevity it just didn't give the people downriver from those dams you know confidence in them but he was confident in them and yeah I mean it even you know shows today that 100 years later his dam is still standing there it's like a work of art and some people compare it to you know the roman runes and stuff just the way it's designed and that so it's uh yeah it's quite a quite a structure living full-time in the motorhome I am well aware that having electricity it's a luxury and this dam it gave that to Antioch's as well the opportunity to thrive and grow into the city that it was but that's not all just because of the dam down on the edge of the water overlooking the ocean is what's left of the old powerhouse and it's just a skeleton today but it's a beautiful look into what once was you look at the old photos and you know it's like you could eat off the floor it was so clean the guys kept that thing just spotless and yeah it's just such a large structure it's a heritage site designated by the regional district as well so yeah it really is a you know a special place the company didn't take any of the the steel or anything off the you know off the sides of the roof or anything they it's still pretty much intact just the wind has taken off the you know parts of the tin roof but yeah such an iconic another iconic structure there and all the old you know I don't know all the old steel and valves and you know the pelton wheel and you know you look at the old photos with all the controls on there and you know the big crane on top you can still pull the chain and the crane will move along it still works to this day it's it's uh yeah just you know it's it's tough even you know trying to get some people out of there sometimes and we've had uh quite a few people that have gone in there you know we've showed them that and they didn't want to leave they came back night after night that we were there and just kept doing uh you know looking uh doing video and photos of the place and just thought it was yeah just so so cool so but yeah and that was you know how they ran the town they needed that powerhouse and um you know all the projects and buildings they had that provided power for every building and every home in in Antioch. There's so many things there you know we talked about those the dam and the powerhouse and the you know the brick factory and the you know the surge tank there's just so many so many cool places there to see you know there's a red light district there you know I know lots of you know towns had red light districts but this you know was a definite red light district with you know specific buildings and you know ladies of the night there and lots of stories of young men going across the slag pile and over the line as they called it and you know the you know some of the people in town looking down on any of these young men who would actually venture over there and taking note and names of them and you know never being invited over for dinner or coffee or you know never conversing with those young men who actually went over there because there was really only one reason. The slag pile as we call it it looks like you know just envision a big black sand beach or a big pile of black sand and it's remnants from the the smelting process so they had little flumes there and they would send it out in a liquid format and keep building up this pile of slag and 15 years after the you know the town opened they actually had a golf course on it so they were kind of ingenious there and decided to put a nine-hole golf course on Canada's most westerly golf course and they used oil on this to make their greens and they had tee boxes and that they had golf tournaments and ladies night men's nights which is it's just crazy you know they didn't have any vegetation there's no grass there so they just use this this black sand to to play golf on and yeah and then now it's been probably 20 years there's a company called Two Grid Abrasives that's in there and they take out this this abrasive stuff this sand and it gets used for all kinds of things so it's been going on for about 20 years now and I think they have at least 20 or 30 years left of taking out slag from from that operation. The first time I'd been there was on an actual tour and I relied on someone else to help you know navigate around so a lot of the stuff that we see today you know we never went to any of those spots you know we've been you know doing the last eight or nine years of brushing out trails and doing you know exploration it's such a massive site and you know even to you know to this day when I go up there I always find new things there and always looking at the maps and a little bucket list of things you know you want to go find out there when you have some extra time to go explore so it's uh you know I think that's one of the other fascinating things it's not just one or two buildings there are so many buildings there to explore and you know even when you've been in the buildings before you go there again you find something you know unique or new or something along the way so you know I'd always looked for a decent map of Antioch's and finally found one in 1927 insurance map of the place so yeah I got a hold of that and then basically just a bunch of pictures of it and then sync them together with a stitching program and yeah so I had this big giant map of Antioch's and then I put it on Google Earth and you know you can use that layers in Google Earth and I kind of just you know I think the transparency you know about 50 60 percent and then I kind of moved it up and down until all the fire hydrants on that map lined up with all the fire hydrant waypoints that I'd created so I probably found 50 fire hydrants there on that site and then when I kind of got them all lined up I kind of saved it and kind of just kind of set it in place and then from there now I have a geo-reference map of Antioch's I can go now and pick points you know there's a big oil storage tank or there's the morgue or there's the you know the red light district or there's someone's house or whatever and I can navigate with my GPS right to that exact spot now so that's definitely helped out with the the exploration and then also knowing what the buildings are I mean the first few years we were just kind of guessing you know there's there's three or four buildings there that you know that you've seen that look like they have vaults in them every one we thought was the bank and it wasn't until you know you get that map that it's definitive you know which one of these buildings you know was actually the bank yeah because it's all geo-referenced and we have all the waypoints now for for all the buildings in town the last baby born in Antioch's a guy named Garnet Weber you know he had his birth certificate there so the the mine shut down in July of 35 he was born June 23rd 1935 had his birth certificate and everything there and we were actually there on his birthday on June 23rd one year and 83 year old man who worked in the bush his whole life he was still tromping around and we got him over to the hospital you know the exact place that he was born 83 years previous to that so that was pretty special you know seeing a little tear in his eye from him getting to that spot again and you know another gentleman that was three years old when he left he lives in Colorado now and he was just fascinated his whole life with this this place called Antioch's that he was born in and lived in for the first few years of his life and he had all these old photos that his parents had left him and you know with these arrows pointing to this house of where he had lived and he didn't think there was any chance he'd ever be able to get back there and then his daughter saw one day that someone was running tours to Antioch's so she jumped all over it and gave it to him for a Christmas present and we took him and his buddy out there and went to the exact spot where this house was and you know we didn't think there was much there just brush but after you know poking around a bit we found a bunch of bricks from the chimney stack as well was still lying down there on the ground so you know typically we don't let people take anything from Antioch's just leave it as is for you know future people to come and see you know how it was but yeah we let him take a brick home with him back to Colorado and yeah he was pretty happy about that. Antioch's is unique in the sense that it's so remote it's actually privately owned so yeah just the access of getting there is so challenging that you know you do need a boat to get there and pretty much a five-hour you know I guess venture from whether it's Prince Rupert Terrace you know wherever you're coming from would take you about five hours to get there so you know in that sense you don't see the you know the pilfering of all the the stuff that's you know in a typical ghost town that's accessible you don't see all the graffiti you know people kind of coming and going into the place and you know you don't see it deteriorating in that sense so and that's that's why I think it's so unique is that you know it has a huge history has so many people that I've talked to that have family members you know they're great grandparents and grandparents and uncles and aunts that actually worked and lived in that place and the number of people that were actually were born there as well I think there was over 300 people born in in Antiox over its lifetime so yeah lots and lots of people out there that have a connection to Antiox you know which may be more so than some of the other ghost towns that we see out there. Antiox finally made it out here check this out this is home sweet home this is actually a super cool setup out here this used to be an old logging camp it was not located here the fellow that owns this had a power project happening here and so we barged it here and then drug it up on shore the road we're driving on it's just up here which used to be the old rail line Rob just took us down what we assume is three cars that have derailed still full of coking coal look at this tree. Exploring Antiox is unlike any place I've ever visited because it is so vast just to give you guys an example we were walking an average of about 15 kilometers a day through dense brush and bush just to see the few things that we did get to see so when we arrived on day one it was already afternoon so we wanted to get up and check out the dam right away we hopped in the truck and headed up the mountain and before you get to the dam there's something sitting out in this field that I have always dreamed of finding on all of my adventures oh man scratched it check it out real live in the flesh train engine wow that's where you stoke the fire you guys can call me conductor d this is definitely one of the highlights of Antiox I'm not going to go super far on here because I'm not like a major fan of heights look at the color of the water it's amazing oh yeah open the floodgates baby quite the feat of engineering for a hundred years ago you don't get to see this kind of stuff not here in Canada anyways oh you can see how deep this slag is though chunk of pipe sticking out there here it is check it out this is probably the most photographed building here at Antiox this is the old powerhouse wow look at how that wood is still in there and in surprisingly good shape holy look at this crane almost wants to move wow this actually still works I can see that drum up there moving with the cable might even roll still oh wow look at that a hundred years later and it still moves that's crazy these old powerhouses they get uh scavenged pretty quickly people come and take all the copper out of there it's the only thing that's really worth that much money hundred year old ladder I'd like to take a look but you guys always get mad at me when I do something not safe I'll leave it up to you guys one two three vote okay you talked me into it pretty spongy I can see there is holes in that so I'm not gonna go right to the end but uh pretty cool just finishing up the end of day one here and let me tell you there is so much more than I ever would have imagined just finished dinner I'm gonna go check out the old red light district I don't know why they called it that maybe bad traffic or something anyways let's go check it out just coming into it there was only maybe four or five houses here before not sure what the pits for you can definitely tell this was a house site here see the square bed in the corner here of course the springs are just stretched right out wow you know what this is actually really cool because you can see the square how the house was and uh everything's kind of still in its original spot here that's so cool oh yeah check this thing out whoo somebody was making money up in here wow that's pretty cool look at that big old bear track all right and a wolf track pretty active area we're currently walking along what is formerly bayview street look at that little insulator there you can tell this was a power pole two more insulators up top check this out so still bayview street apartment buildings there's one little house back in here not much left but it sounds like we'll be able to follow this along to main street our camp where we're staying it's directly down here so we just found what was the manager's house and you can tell already was quite a large house holy extensive foundation left here wow so this would have had wood siding on it here also wow this was big really really big and again just like the other one imagine this with no trees or anything straight out to the ocean would have just been unbelievable see this obviously a pile of bricks would have been the chimney there today is the only full day here so i'm gonna try and get in as much as i can just leaving the manager's house and i think we're gonna go try and find the bank now just on the edge of main street and if you guys been watching the channel for a while you've heard me talk about sidewalks fire hydrants and manhole covers because when you find them in these old towns it's uh really brings you back to reality because they're exactly the same as we have in modern society check this out it's an old manhole cover see the water trickling in there still this is all brick actually not cement that's pretty wild speak of the devil just talking about fire hydrants check it out really cool this is the bank well that's actually the vault this is the outside of the bank it is almost completely caved in now very little left but of course if anything is going to survive it would be the vault pretty cool oh yeah there's one wall left still standing there that's pretty neat i wonder why they had two floors of this vault though i'm not sure wow must have been the chimney that's really cool so nice there's a bush right here with some massive blueberries this is the site of the old government building there is almost nothing left of the foundation or anything which would have stretched out over here but what there is is the vault come on yeah look at that it's a light socket there that's cool and one brick must have a gold bar in it i wonder if this is from uh from the original light i bet it is see this big flat area right here this would have been a house and if we come over here this right here is hill street i'll put in a photo so you guys can see exactly where we are but on both sides of me would have been houses all the way up here you can just barely see right here what's left of one of those houses one section of wall going along and then that mound there is maybe the chimney well maybe not it's hard to tell but yeah these would have been both sides all the way up here so what is this one here oh yeah good shape still wow wood still left in there that's cool well this walkway looks sketched to the max i'm sure this platform is plenty sturdy but you can feel it shaking when you step on it wow haven't even got into that yet beautiful wowee pretty thick in here oh my god down the stairs hey this is kind of cool this old door half door anyways not much left of whatever this was whoa that's full of something nasty nailed it wow not sure if we're getting into this one oh yeah i'll get in there dang it we're in whoa look at that one pretty rough shape this one it just keeps on climbing this looks like the edge of a cliff but it's the wall of some sort of building all brick that's a lot of brick still in good shape this place is crazy everywhere you go something don't march there that's cool what do you guys think again rooftop bar baby in all seriousness though this is i guess the brick factory pretty cool makes sense why that building right here is entirely brick i dig it so these are ovens eh yeah wow some are empty some are right full all right so are these new made bricks i think so wow talk about new old stock wow there's a lot of them all the way it's pretty cool eh like just kiln after kiln the whole structure oh yeah there's no brush here one more spot to check out today that's the chimney from the coking oven there it is gone up a little bit too high we're going in can i have your flashlight look at a ladder going up there well i'm not walking right out there there's a lot of bricks that have fallen down and then it's a straight shot down here we go coking chimney check it off the list evening of the second night right now rob got me set up with quad there's a few things that i really want to check out so i'm here right at uh what i guess you'd call kind of downtown check this out right now i am on main street and see the corner of this foundation here this used to actually be the old hotel which is so cool i'll put in a photo for you guys there's not a whole lot left today other than just foundation but this was a massive building in here look at that trying to line things up here and i'm just going off a photo in my mind but i'll put another photo for you guys see this ridge coming down right here just on the bottom of that was the old tennis courts so this here would have been the company building another great big one surprises looks like what's just a door there no window or anything but it's surprising because this would have been all clear and that's just ocean beautiful ocean right there see we can find in here oh and this is a vault wow this is cool the door's still there too holy this is in much better shape than the than the other buildings that had vaults look at that that's uh two layers of brick and then sand maybe interesting like that little design there it's funny a lot of these places i explore i'm lucky if i can find a couple big buildings like this here at antiox it is just everywhere you go like everywhere holy wow look at this tree just growing right like right around this i don't know this used to hold some sort of tank maybe a boiler or something but look at this freaking tree wow it's solid iron here i wonder if this will have a root that ends up coming down on that side but like not a super young tree it's been around for a while just growing right through there that's cool oh yeah there's some sort of building right here and yeah second one so this is definitely the hospital right here see this is this is what really paints a picture for me this is probably an old hospital bed right there it's just crazy i'm not sure what that is it's got some neat spokes on it though that's cool so i don't see a door to this one maybe come in from the top wow so at first i was just gonna guess but i'm almost certain you can see the wheel there this is well i'm not gonna i don't want to pull it up out of there it's stuck in the dirt and i don't want to tear it apart but i bet this is what the doctor used to have tools and stuff on roll around the hospital wow it's just crazy to see that kind of stuff left behind pretty overgrown in here tank there is some kind frame of a bed there hospital bed it's the only piece of wood left in this building right there back up here on main street and i keep calling it a street or a road they didn't actually have roads here it was all wooden planking and you either walked or took a train and most people walked everywhere they went here but could you imagine walking along here and this would have been all buildings up here all buildings down here hard to picture it today holy smokes aniox what an amazing place to explore this is definitely one of my favorite spots so far i hope you guys enjoyed it too i hope you learned something but most of all just thank you for watching and a big thanks to rob bryce for all the work that he's done out there all of the trail brushing and collecting photographs and just putting in all the work to preserve that history it's really amazing and he's probably the most knowledgeable person in the world about aniox so big thanks to him huge thank you to my amigos with fence fast they're the ones that made this particular adventure possible for me so super thankful for them uh big thank you to all of my patrons the channel's growing pretty fast right now as well as the patreon page and that's really exciting because that gives me the ability to get out to some of these more expensive and remote places that you guys have been asking for for years so i hope that the patreon page just continues to grow and you'll probably notice how quick i cut this one together and there's a lot of stuff that didn't even make it into the video unfortunately just because it was getting so long so i think the folks over at patreon are going to be getting a butt ton of bonus stuff out of this one and i'm excited to share that with them as always take nothing but pictures leave nothing but footprints and i'll catch you on the next one sometimes things happen beyond your control as if they have a life of their own choices you make what appears to be right seems you just have no say as if you're a witness to your own mistakes it's easy to play along after you see what the choices came to be like a storm that's passed on